Student surveys

[cabrown@UTARLG.UTA.EDU]

Here's something I do to survey the students who use our centers.  And I
hang on to these, waiting for the day that some administrator asks for
evidence of our effectiveness.  

Each semester I ask one or two instructors to require all of their
students to come to the Writing Center for a tutoring session ( I realize
that this is a controversial request for many of you).  Then the
instructor asks the students to write a brief analysis and evaluation of
the tutoring session.  I think this works especially well in letting the
students determine what they want to comment about.  The instructor
gives me a copy of their essays and I share them with the tutors.  (All
of this is done with the student's permission, of course.) We have gained
valuable information from these informal surveys.  And they are great
morale boosters because 90% of them are very positive.  The tutors love
reading about how much the students learned from the sessions and how much
the students _enjoyed_ the tutoring sessions.   Moreover, the instructors
get a sense of how valuable the Writing Center is to their students.

Cheryl Brown
Univ. of Texas at Arlington